Nathan Potter on the Future of Travel Future of Living

Nathan leads Wander's product and engineering team. Their core focus is on building and delivering high-quality products that delight customers and help scale business functions. He has previously spent time building established products at Fortune 500 companies and also greenfield products as an early-stage startup team member. Nathan has 7+ years of experience where he has built and deployed systems that have needed to handle scale for eCommerce giants like Target and security constraints for Intelligence Agencies and large financial institutions across the globe.
In this conversation, Nathan discusses how Wander is paving the way for a more automated and luxurious travel experience than ever before. 
 
Discussion: 
Background of Wander.  Why was having a Tesla onsite important for creating a good experience? What has it been like to integrate with Tesla? How do you choose which smart devices to integrate with? What are some of the surprises of creating a concierge experience?  What are some of the processes you have created for your team's back-office system? How do you allocate resources for your client-facing system vs. your back-office system?  Is there anything that you have wanted to build but decided not to?  How do you approach integrating the whole tech stack?  Lightening round questions.   
Links:
https://www.wander.com/
 
Transcript: 
Nathan Potter
We're working directly with Tesla and our auto insurance companies to basically build out a miniature Turro within our app. So we've gotta go through the onboarding process of signing the agreements for the rental and waiving all of the policies and the auto insurance and everything and then integrating with the Tesla API as well. 
Blake Miller
Welcome to the Future Living Podcast. Today I've got a really exciting episode with my friend Nathan Pottery, the CTO of Wander. Wander is, as I've been describing to a lot of friends, kind of the company that I've got a startup crush on. And I'm excited to bring this one to you as one of our first episodes back for the Future Living podcast because we're doing a lot of similar things, but they're focused more on vacation rentals.
Nathan, welcome. Why don't you give everybody a little bit of background on what you guys are doing with Wander?
Nathan Potter
Hey, thanks for having me on Blake. Love what you're doing over at Homebase. Yeah, would love to. So we're basically building a network of smart homes across the globe. Currently, right now we're located across the United States and looking to expand into Canada, Mexico, and Europe this year. But each home you can imagine as a luxury real estate property. You walk in the lights turn on, the music is playing, and the fireplace is on setting the ambiance for your stay. You can control everything through the app, whether that's the shades, the lights, the locks, the garage doors, really anything. You can control the Tesla through the app as well. So each of our properties comes with a Tesla for you to use.
We love it. It's a ton of fun. We've been able to build some really cool integrations with Tesla and have been working with their API team to integrate directly with them and that's been a lot of fun to experience. 
Blake Miller
We're talking about the home and all this stuff and maybe that's something we can start with because what you're describing is something that's just so cool. You guys are designing such an amazing experience for people that are traveling, right? And what I think is so cool too is it's not just for your standard family or couple that's getting an Airbnb, you know. You support this group travel model. And I'm curious with all of that, why was having a car on-site or having a Tesla there so important to creating a good user experience or a good resume experience?
Nathan Potter
Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of our properties are relatively close to airports and a lot of times people will fly in and get an Uber to the proper